How The Great Australian Dream Became A Total Nightmare

And why those who can help us wake up are happily asleep at the wheel.

I recently tried to buy a home for my family. Just the one. To live in. I'm so old-fashioned.

I failed because there was someone else willing to keep borrowing while interest rates are at historic lows. I was already at a figure I couldn't say without frothing at the mouth. The bank manager assured me that most people were borrowing way more, but I felt uncomfortable with all those zeros and stopped bidding. And frothing.

I'd relax and keep renting but, thanks to investors cashing in on the stratospheric Sydney market, we've been forced to move every 12 months for the past two years. That causes its own frothing – looking for a rental, while searching vainly for something to buy, while raising two children, while working full-time...

Yet I'm one of the lucky ones. I can afford to rent. Friends of ours are struggling even to do that. They're the most interesting people we know. They've travelled wide and lived far, but now they're back in Australia and the only reason the wolf isn't at their door is because he can't keep up with all their moves.

Renting With Kids will never be a board game. It's simply not enough fun. But when life becomes a game of Monopoly and more and more families are paying other people's mortgages, we urgently need rental contracts that favour tenants rather than landlords, who already have more perks than you could poke a negatively geared stick at.

I recently tried to explain negative gearing to some of my wife's Italian friends, who are taxed exponentially more on second and subsequent homes. They simply refused to believe that multiple home owners would get a tax break. They thought I'd drunk too much grappa, or my Italian was letting me down. I wish they were right.

Negative gearing is positively absurd, but it's not the cause of the current crisis. We've had negative gearing for years, just as we've had population growth, overseas buyers, speculative investors and a warped idea of the 'value' of owning property.

The lowest interest rates in history have simply poured petrol on the combined fire of all those factors. Cheap money has made property expensive. Singling out negative gearing, or population growth, or overseas buyers, or speculative investors is wasting time in finding a solution.

But who wants to find a solution? Not those with the power to actually implement one, that's for sure. Self-serving politicians, many of whom own multiple investment properties, aren't about to help aspiring home owners out. They're getting richer by the minute. The only thing poor about them is their 'solutions'.

Anyone who tells you that supply alone is the answer is shying from the real question. Addressing supply without pulling other policy levers will merely move the investor feeding frenzy to new pastures. If you're going to build new post codes, they need to be built on level playing fields.

'High-paying jobs', 'The Bank of Mum and Dad'... all the 'solutions' you'll hear from those happy with the status quo fail to address the problem that to get into the market people are borrowing WAY BEYOND THEIR MEANS and that household debt is WAY TOO HIGH.

That's not a solution, that's dereliction of duty.

Bloomberg via Getty ImagesWhen asked about the gap between rich and poor in Australia, the Prime Minister preferred to reply with a hand gesture.

The high cost of housing is a national issue, so federal politicians should be taking it far more seriously. But it's biting more aggressively in some states, so individual premiers need to roll up their sleeves.

Yes, he had the whole country transitioning from the mining boom to think about, and balancing house prices in a few metro hotspots with the economic interests of an entire nation was an unenviable task.

But cutting rates as dramatically as the Reserve Bank did, particularly the two cuts in the middle of last year (from 2 to 1.5 percent) has seen investors scrummage like pigs at a trough and aspiring home owners borrow crazy money to compete.

Should a correction occur, the ramifications for those who have over-borrowed would be far worse than the good done to the economy by cutting rates in the first place. Sometimes the side effects of a drug are worse than the original symptoms.

Bloomberg via Getty Images"What, house prices have risen by how much?" Hang on, I'll cut interest rates again and see if that helps.

By paying lip service to the problem and failing to at least name, if not address the real cause, politicians have left 'the Australian people' to squabble over who or what is to blame. This has caused a generational dispute involving baby boomers, millennials and posh f**king fruit.

I have genuine admiration for the parent home owners I know who have become asset rich over the past few years but yet who realise their kids are still worse off when homes are out of reach of average people. I'm not sure if they're visionary economists or they'd simply prefer not to have to check for cyanide each time their children make them a cup of tea.

I've never heard so many young people say they won't be able to afford a home until their parents die, and even then it'll have to be split between their siblings. What a delightful conversation. Well done, Australia.

I've also never heard so many young people worrying over taking a gap year, or travelling, or experiencing, rather than plugging into the grid and trying to get the money together for a deposit. What a blinkered bunch of money obsessed people we've become. Our kids need a thirst for worldliness, for knowledge, for culture, for art, for sustainable living... not a fear of missing out on a roof over their heads.

And yet we blame them. We blame them for having unreasonable expectations. We've selfishly conspired to saddle them with a spluttering planet, computers who want their jobs, and driven them into debt to get a higher education. Now if they smear avocado on their toast they are ungrateful swine who have no idea how their parents suffered to 'give' them all this.

No wonder we're all waiting for our parents to die.

I moved back to Australia from England because I disliked the snobbery of a class society. Ten years I was away. Ten years I spent hailing Australia as deserving of its 'lucky country' label.

"You don't have to be rich to live well in Australia," I said to my wife when convincing her that this was the place to raise our family. But after all the moves and all the frothing since we've been back, she is starting to think that I lied to her.

And so am I.

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Okay, that's my rant over. Now it's time for others to have their say. Over the next few weeks The Huffington Post Australia will run a series of daily blogs on housing affordability called The Great Australian Nightmare.

Everyone from senior government ministers to first-home buyers will have their say on what we at HuffPost Australia consider one of the biggest issues facing Australia.

If you'd like to submit a blog, you can send a 500-800 piece through to blogteam@huffingtonpost.com.au